Hiding PTSD Records Of Civil War Veterans?

EditorialThe Hartford Courant

Doesn't this sound familiar?

Some years ago, Connecticut scholars researching post-traumatic stress disorder in Civil War veterans won a state Freedom of Information Commission ruling providing the researchers access to records of patients treated at a Middletown mental health facility in the 1860s.

That researchers would want to search such records makes sense. As Matthew Warshauer, the Central Connecticut State University professor who petitioned for the records, has written, the history of Civil War soldiers has "stark relevance for today's soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan."

But the reign of common sense was all too brief.

The researchers' hard-won victory at FOIC was overturned. With the blessing of the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, lawmakers attached language making such records confidential to a larger bill and passed it at the end of the 2011 session.

The unpersuasive rationale for putting such ancient records under wraps was laid out in earlier written testimony by DMHAS Commissioner Patricia Rehmer:

"Though the individuals were deceased, it is our firm belief that records of this nature are very sensitive and that family members of those who have been in state hospitals would not want that information disclosed," she wrote.

But assessment of information from the records of the long dead might do more good than harm in helping the living victims of traumatic stress.

This session the General Assembly will consider a bill that would strip the veil of secrecy from records in state archives over time. For medical records, for example, the prohibition would be lifted 50 years after the person's death.